Here are a few definitions of terms that you might encounter as you learn more about SSO:

  • Service Provider (SP) provides IT solutions and/or services to end-users and organizations. E.g. Freshworks

  • Identity Provider (IdP) is a service that stores and verifies user identity. Identity providers offer user authentication as a service. E.g. Google, Okta, Azure Ad, etc. 

  • Open Authorization (OAuth) 2 is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for Internet users to grant websites or applications access to their information on other websites but without giving them the passwords [Wikipedia]. 

  • OpenID Connect (OIDC) is an identity layer that sits on top of OAuth 2. It enables easy verification of the identity of an end-user based on the authentication performed by an authorization server, as well as to obtain basic profile information about the end-user. [Wikipedia]

  • JSON Web Tokens (JWT) is a compact URL-safe means of representing claims to be transferred between two parties. The claims in a JWT are encoded as a JSON object.

  • Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) is an open standard for exchanging authentication and authorization data between parties, in particular, between an identity provider and a service provider.


To learn more about SSO, refer to these articles below.

If you are looking for specific information about SSO for Freshworks or configuration related guides for supported protocols, here is a list of articles for you to read: